Category: Scotland 1 (Page 4 of 4)

While out today simultaneously gaining weight for my pack while shedding pounds, I stopped in the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons, a couple blocks down the hill toward the River Clyde from my hotel.  As luck would have it, the librarian and archivist, Carol Parry, was at the reception desk when I arrived.  She kindly agreed to give me a tour.

Founded in 1599 by a man who had previously been surgeon to the King of France, it is both a licensing body and a professional society.  Its presidency alternates between surgeons and non-surgeons (which is to say, physicians).  In England there are separate royal societies for the two professions.

Scotland has been a distinguished center of medical research education for centuries.  It is, among other things, the place where many American Jews came when quotas kept them out of American medical schools.  The Royal College is full of history.

Joseph Lister (who went to University College London because as a Quaker he was denied entrance to Oxford or Cambridge) did his studies of the antimicrobial properties of carbolic acid at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary.  This ushered in antiseptic surgery.  There’s a meeting room named for him that includes a fireplace and heavily scarred table scavenged from his ward before it was torn down.  The papers of Ronald Ross, who described the connection between mosquitoes and malaria and won a Nobel Prize, are on display at the moment.  The portraits on the walls include David Livingstone of “Dr. Livingstone, I presume . . . ” fame, and Graham Teasdale, the neurosurgeon who co-designed the Glasgow Coma Scale.

One of the more interesting things, however, has nothing to do with medicine.

It is a volume of the “double elephant” folio of Audubon’s “Birds of America.”  The full set consists of four volumes; the college has two, bought for 40 guineas in 1841.  These books were rare when they were published from 1827 to 1838.  Most of the ones that survived have been cut up to for the sale of their prints.

Carol Parry and the double Audubon folio

Ms. Parry unhooded the display case to reveal an owl and the never-ending final moment of its squirrel prey.  The colors are as saturated as they were when the page was pulled off the plate.  Every few months she turns a page.

Off the reception area is a grimmer picture.

“Stretcher Bearers” is a dark painting that depicts helmeted men, many of them medical students. carrying casualties of the German bombing of Clydebank, a town up the river from Glasgow.  In the blitz of March 13 and 14, 1941, 528 people were killed and shipyards, armament plants and a Singer sewing machine factory were destroyed.

“Stretcher Bearers”

There are 322 people enrolled in The Great Outdoors  Challenge (hereafter TGOC).  The demographics skews sharply to the retired and near-retired by the look of the list.  There are only eight walkers under 30, but 32 over 70, three over 80 and one 91-year-old man who will be making his 20th “crossing,” as it’s called.

There are 142 solo walkers, one of them me.  I learned of the hike a couple of weeks before the application deadline and couldn’t round up someone else to come along.  But my advisor Roger Hoyle, soon to be an eight-time “Challenger,” assures me I’ll meet lots of people along the way.  I’m sure he’s right.  Forty-six people are starting from Mallaig, where I will, and 86 will end up at St. Cyrus, where I hope I will also.

There are 42 couples, four father/son  teams, one father/daughter team, one mother/father/son team, and a pair of brothers.

Eight countries besides the United Kingdom are represented:  the Netherlands (16), the United States (10),  Austria (2), France (2), Germany (2) , Denmark (1), Oman (1) and Nigeria (1).

I had never given one second’s thought to walking across Scotland until I sat next to Roger Hoyle at dinner in Moscow in October,  2014.

Roger (and his wife Roz) were visiting their son, who is a correspondent for The Times of London.  I was visiting my friends Kathy Lally and Will Englund, The Washington Post’s correspondents.  I don’t know how the conversation started–perhaps a query about how he was filling his time, as that was on my mind–but I soon learned that for seven years Roger had spent two weeks each May hiking from the west coast to the east coast of Scotland in an event called The Great Outdoors Challenge.

I queried him heavily, down to the weight of his tent and how many pairs of pants he carried. At some point it dawned on me I could do this.  Which is to say there was nothing stopping me.  My next thought was that I had better do it soon as it wasn’t going to get any easier.

The Great Outdoors Challenge is sponsored by an English magazine called The Great Outdoors. It’s been going on for more than 30 years and is now part of the hallowed tradition of Scottish “hill walking,” or so it seems. It has a few rules (no racing, no dogs) and is built on an atavistic DIYism foreign to American backpacking.

In the United States, you have to stay on the trail, stay off private property, and camp only in designated areas. On the TGOC, you can take any route you want (but would be advised to look for trails), cross any private property (except the grounds of Balmoral Castle), and camp anyplace you fancy (as long as it’s away from houses and animals).

Just what I’ve always wanted!

But be careful what you wish for.

The logistics for the TGOC are considerable.  You have to apply and provide enough evidence to convince the “vetters” that you are likely make the 220-mile, 14-day crossing successfully.  You must submit an itinerary with each day’s route described, the distance and vertical ascent calculated, and the camping place named.  For sections dangerous or impassible in bad weather, you must to provide a foul-weather alternative route.  You have to call in to the organizers  four times during the crossing and let them know promptly if you decide, as they decorously put it, “to retire” before the end.

Much of this can be done on a computer through a site called Anquet after buying and downloading maps from the Ordnance Survey, Britain’s official mapping agency.  The software makes the calculations but you still have to set the route, a considerable task when the landscape is foreign the client computer dumb.

Luckily, Roger Hoyle is a man of great patience and generosity.   He gave me the first route he took, beautiful and not too hard he claimed (although it does include at least one 18-mile day).  He spent a very long time on a very expensive phone call one Sunday afternoon explaining how to use the software.

After losing half this work to the ether (rather than the cloud, where it was supposed to go), and rerouting and recalculating,  I submitted the plan for approval.  It was accepted by a  kind vetter named Bernie Marshall, whose advice includes instruction to get “a brew and a bacon buttie” at a particular hostel in the village of Tarfside towards the end of the hike.

I’m not exactly sure what a bacon buttie is, but I’m already looking forward to it.